Writing boards such as whiteboards and blackboards are frequently used in many different settings (e.g., academic, corporate, non-profit, residential, etc.). Various content including text, drawings, tables, flowcharts, and graphs may be drawn or placed on the writing boards for lectures, training, brainstorming sessions, etc.
In order to electronically record these ideas, a photograph of the writing board may be taken. Further, image processing such as optical character recognition (OCR), stroke recognition, and reconstruction may be executed to extract the contents of the writing board from the image.
In some circumstances, it is beneficial to be able to produce a “flowchart object” from the captured image of a flowchart. The flowchart object is an object in computer memory which consists of nodes, connectors, node contents, connector labels, etc. A variety of representations may be produced from such an object. For example, the flowchart object may be used to produce a PowerPoint representation of the flowchart. Such a representation is easily editable using the PowerPoint application.
Images of flowcharts could originate from various sources such as photographs of flowcharts drawn on whiteboards and scans of documents containing flowcharts. The automatic creation of an editable version of a flowchart is useful because it allows for the manipulation (e.g., editing, addition or deletion of content) of the flowchart without the need for manually producing the initial editable version.